Tag Archives: Claire Clairmont

New Paperback Edition of Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley

A new paperback edition of “Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: Frankenstein Diaries” with an updated cover is available for bookstores and libraries through Ingramspark and through Amazon. The cover is of Mary Shelley as she writes her book and dreams of her visit to the castle on the Rhine where her experiences would suggest a story to her. The novel tells the story of Mary Godwin’s elopement with Percy Shelley and Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont on a journey of discovery as they walk across France to Switzerland.

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Is this a “lost” portrait of Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin?

Mrs Godwin (?) Portrait at Chawton House

On a recent visit to Chawton House in Hampshire England, most familiarly known for its connection to Jane Austen, I came across this portrait. The Chawton House library has obtained a collection of the writings of early woman travel writers, referred to as The Centre for the Study of Early Women’s Writing, 1600–1830, including Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.

This oil on canvas original painting hangs in an upper hallway. One might expect it to be in the National Portrait Gallery or some other vaunted institution of collection, but you have to go to Hampshire to see it. A card below the painting asks, “Could this be Mary Wollstonecraft?” Two cards provide its uncertain provenance and clues.

“Portrait of a lady said to be Mrs. Godwin, née Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) Attributed to George Beare (1725-1749)  Oil on Canvas 1792 (?)”

“Is this Mary Wollstonecraft, famous women’s rights writer. The answer remains a mystery. At auction, it was attributed to George Beare and said to be ‘Mrs Godwin, authoress, 1792’ (as per a faint inscription on the front). She does not closely resemble the known portrait by John Opie and George Beare died 10 years before Wollstonecraft was born.”

“Her ‘mob cap’ is characteristic of the late 1780s, so it is unlikely that George Beare painted it. Another label on the back attributes it to John Downman RA, a plausible possibility as he was working in London at this time.”

I agree that the subject of the portrait bears little resemblance to any known likenesses of Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. But it does seem to bear a resemblance to someone else in the Godwin household. I’ll let you be the judge.

The attribution to George Beare I think can easily be dismissed, while John Downman, who was a prolific painter of portraits, in admittedly different styles, could be accurate. But what of the reference “said to be Mrs Godwin, authoress, 1792 (?).” What if it is indeed Mrs Godwin, however not the first, but the second, Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin, Mary Shelley’s stepmother?

If the date of 1792 is correct, this is negative evidence, as Mary Jane Clairmont was of no notoriety at that time. But if the other characteristics are considered, perhaps the date (?) is off.

In the portrait, she is holding a book in her hands, clearly suggesting her connection to writing, or publishing. Of the precious little we know of Mary Jane Clairmont’s physical look, is that her daughter had brown hair, and a brief comment in Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks Tour, a French hotel page referred to her as “a fat lady’. How he may have meant that is open to interpretation, but the woman in the portrait is not slight or thin.

After her marriage to William Godwin in 1801, four years after the death of Wollstonecraft, the Godwins opened their publishing business, The M.J. Godwin Juvenile Library. The business first opened in 1805 off Oxford Street and relocated to 41 Skinner Street in 1807, registered in her name. William Godwin was well known in the literati circle, for his writing and his philosophical bent, but his wife was now a London publisher. They published the Swiss Family Robinson (1816) and other works that came to some prominence, including the Charles and Mary Lamb’s volumes of Shakespear. Though the business struggled later, in the years of its beginning must have been of some notoriety. Mary Jane Godwin was an editor and nominal writer on her own, so a reference to “authoress” is not out of line, or connected to a mistaken identification as Wollstonecraft.

It would seem quite natural that an artist like Downman might be persuaded to paint the wife of a prominent London literary figure like Godwin and a formidable person on her own. And in the first decade of the Juvenile Library, the money for a portrait paid by the business earnings seems reasonable.

If this were indeed M. J. Godwin and not Mary Wollstonecraft the date would likely be around 1806 to 1812. This could easily be within the timeframe John Downman was in London, presenting his works in exhibits. The “mob cap” for older women was still in style into the 1820s with added lace popular beginning around 1800. The cap in this portrait appears to have lace as a prominent feature of its fashionable design and the proud dress of the middle-class is unlike the more egalitarian simple style of Wollstonecraft.

Mrs Godwin ? Mystery Portrait Comparison

Comparison of “Mrs Godwin” at Chawton House and two known portraits of Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie

For the other “evidence” we would have to rely on the visual. If we look at the portrait in question in comparison to the known portraits of Wollstonecraft, painted by John Opie, one painted within a year of Wollstonecraft’s death in childbirth, said by Mary to be painted while she was pregnant with her, they look wholly different. If we then compare the painting of “Mrs Godwin” with the known portrait of Claire Clairmont, the resemblance is striking, while the quality of the Clairmont portrait is somewhat less.

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Comparison of “Mrs Godwin” at Chawton House to Claire Clairmont

Is this comparison conclusive? Clearly not, and as mysterious as the question of its being Wollstonecraft, it seems to me well within the realm of possibility that a “lost” portrait of Mary Jane Vail Godwin née Clairmont, London publisher, editor and step-mother of Mary Shelley, authoress of Frankenstein, has lain misidentified for two centuries. You be the judge.

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Mary Shelley’s Seduction: Who was seducer and who seduced?

!9th Century Seduction Scene -Byron and ClaireIn present times we tend to have a modern revisionist view of human behavior in the past. Some behavior in relationships and sex seems a constant from ancient forgotten times to the present, but the rules of society, the prism through which we view them as acceptable or taboo changes and shifts. What was common to men and women in days of old has new meaning in the age of #metoo. I was recently reminded of this in a discussion of the movie version of Mary Shelley. The thematic premise of which seemed to be how Mary was seduced by Percy only to find out later he was married, and Claire was seduced and abandoned by a libertine Bryon, and that Mary was deliberately denied credit for writing Frankenstein because she was a woman. While the question of credit due for Frankenstein’s authorship is a complex subject, especially in a time when anonymous publication was fairly common and the risk to social reputation was as much a consideration as any financial reward, and deeply bound in the difficult search for a publisher for a manuscript rejected several times, I’ll stick to the seduction discussion.

I find it odd that what is intended to be a feminist view of a patriarchy chooses to make women so weak in character that they are unable to make deliberate choices in their own lives, at the mercy of scheming cads. In the recent movie version of the story, Shelley and Mary meet in Scotland, she falls for him, then later discovers! he is married. And then, that Shelley encourages Mary to be pursued by Hogg in some kind of free love invitation which horrifies Mary when Hogg seems to chase her around the furniture. This architecture is inaccurate at best, and disingenuously revisionist.

Mary, of course, knew that Shelley was married before she ever met him. He was in continual correspondence with her father William Godwin, and supplying Godwin with financial assistance when Mary was as young as fourteen. Mary first met Shelley when he came to visit Skinner Street with his new bride, Harriet Westbrook. It was with Harriet that Shelley had eloped with to Scotland, where they married privately and then remarried in London at a formal ceremony, where the Godwins may have been witnesses. Percy Shelley had been a visitor to Skinner Street while Mary was away in Scotland with the Baxters, during which time Mary’s half-sister Fanny developed an infatuation with him, which was superseded by Mary’s attraction to him in the spring of 1814, leading to the elopement trip to Paris.

Harriet Shelley, as the aggrieved wife, accused Mary as the romantic schemer, writing at the time that, “Mary was determined to seduce him, she is to blame. She heated his imagination by talking of her mother, and going to her grave with him every day, till at last she told him she was dying in love for him.” This is hardly the picture of the unwitting naïve waif presented in the film version of the story.

As for Thomas Jefferson Hogg, he was more infatuated with Shelley’s wife, Harriet, than he was with Mary. It had been Harriet who Hogg had pursued with an intensity of ardor that seems to be the inspiration for the chasing around furniture, and rebuffed by her. As for Mary, he was her confidante during the difficult days of pregnancy and the tragic loss of her first child, a time when Shelley was desperately dodging creditors. Shelley is notoriously on record as suggesting in the spirit of their shared philosophy of “free love”, that Mary could be with Hogg. Shelley meant this as an expression of freedom for her, that she enjoyed Hogg’s company and if they were true to their ideals he would not stand to the way. Mary rejected this idea outright, having no expressed desire for anyone beyond Shelley. If she did have a romantic thought for someone outside her relationship with Shelley it would have been Byron, with whom she seemed to share a sympathetic temperament and a respect of his talent. But any thought of a physical liaison had been tempered by her step-sister Claire’s difficult relation with Bryon.

In the film version, this is treated as Byron seducing and then abandoning Claire. However, it is much more likely that it was Claire who deliberately sought out Byron, who already had the public reputation of “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, from his scandalous affair with Caroline Lamb. Claire had an early infatuation with Byron as a famous figure of the time, like a modern girl might with a pop star. Claire (her actual given name was Jane, but she took on Claire as a romantic affectation), had an interest in the theater and sought an introduction to Bryon when he was a director of the Drury Lane Theatre. Drawing on her family connection to William Godwin and an introduction, very likely through Bryon’s publisher John Murray, she had delivered to him a copy of her, then and forever lost, unpublished manuscript of “The Idiot” or Ideot, written following the elopement trip with Mary and Percy, asking that he might consider it for a play and give her his reaction as a mentor, as many a young hopeful writer of today seeks out a peek at an over the transom unsolicited submission.

She went to see him to gain his response and later wrote of the sad treatment he had given as his reaction to her writing. Whether on this visit, he, like a Regency Harvey Weinstein demanded a sexual payment for her naïve theatrical ambitions, or instead, like a romantically infatuated groupie, she seduced him, I think is entirely open to conjecture. Claire had demonstrated a willfulness toward a sexual freedom notion of “free love” that was much more literal than the more intellectual ideas held by Shelley and Godwin, which was more about the financial strictures of legal marriage than it was about sex. In either case, the result was a pregnancy after apparently one brief encounter on a theatre office or London hotel residence casting couch.

It was Claire who then designed to pursue Bryon with the intent to snare his name in marriage with the evidence of the child growing in her. Claire suggested the trip to Geneva to introduce them to Bryon. Whether Mary or Shelley were aware of Claire’s intent is unknown, but it is clear that once the pregnancy was revealed to Lord Byron, he wanted nothing to do with a continued relationship with her. He agreed to financially support the resulting child, but his interest in the mother was less than nil. Byron’s temperament and Mary’s were much more compatible, and he likely felt much less a risk of his fortunes in a friendship with her than Claire.

Their friendship, even from afar, would continue until Byron’s death, with Mary caretaking the publication of his work along with Shelley’s, and a fondness in their Italy travels, even as Shelley’s relationship with Byron had become strained.

As for Shelley and Claire, whether he ever had a sexual relationship with her is also a matter of two-hundred years of conjecture. Mary herself insisted vehemently that they did not. Could she have been naïve about it, willingly blind, or just publicly defensive, protesting loudly to assuage the rumors? Maybe. Shelley clearly enjoyed Claire’s company at some level. She was less serious than Mary, more frivolous, and they could share ribald humor together that Mary chided as disgusting. Shelley was more amused by Claire’s antics than Mary, who seemed to view their life in each other’s constant company as mostly annoying. The salacious scandal rumors at the time among London gossips, the equivalent of tabloids, were that William Godwin had “sold” both of his daughters to Shelley, and every form of lascivious behavior was attributed to them. It had even been suggested that Claire’s daughter Ianthe was Shelley’s child and not Byron’s, but none of the actual participants ever accepted this.

Did Percy Shelley sleep with Claire or encourage an orgy of free love? This is a question Mary clearly answers in her Secret Memoirs, at least up to that point in her story and found at the heart of their journey.

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Mary Shelley in Bath – Frankenstein Begins

Tragedy, Turmoil and Creativity for the Shelleys in Bath

5 Abbey Churchyard Bath

Shelley’s 5 Abbey Churchyard

The city of Bath makes a great deal of fuss about its place in the life of Regency author Jane Austen. There’s an Austen Centre, exhibits and annual celebrations, tour marketing and the like. Austen lived in Bath for nine years from 1800 to 1809, but her time in Bath was not especially significant in her own literary history. She wrote the drafts of her completed novels before moving there, and she was not published until after she had left. While for the longest time, the city barely acknowledged its place in the life of Austen’s contemporary author, Mary Shelley, who developed and wrote a significant portion of her greatest work while a resident there. A museum for the author of Frankenstein is now in the planning stage.

Though only a fairly brief five months, the time spent in Bath by Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley and Clare Clairmont in 1816 were some of the most tumultuous and eventful in their story and in the formulation of Mary’s novel of Frankenstein. Within this few months, a birth and two suicides would deeply affect them, and by the time they left, Mary Godwin would be Mrs. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

After departing the company of Byron in Geneva, the Shelley party, Shelley, Mary, Clare, the Shelleys’ two-year-old son, William, and a nurse, Elise Duvillard, hired in Switzerland, returned back to England. They travelled through France on a different route than they had taken in 1814, passing through Dijon, Auxerre, and Villeneuve, while stopping for brief tourist visits at the palaces of Fontainebleau and Versailles, and to Rouen for the Cathedral. They sailed from Le Havre to Portsmouth on the 8th of September, 1816.

Bath Then and NowFrom Portsmouth, Shelley separated from the two sisters to see his friend, Thomas Peacock, in Great Marlow, while Mary and Clare went to Bath. Clare’s pregnancy by Byron was beginning to show or make her condition, at least, clear by this time, and the idea was to find a distant lodging from London. Mary was still estranged from her father for her relationship with Shelley and they thought to conceal Clare’s condition. She was still using alternate spellings of her chosen name, Claire or Clare. It was mostly Claire in Switzerland and France using the French spelling, and Clare or Clara in England. Mary was confused enough to use both spellings in the same letter, while others of the family were still calling her by her birth name, Jane (Mary Jane, after her mother).

Mary Godwin wrote two diary entries of their arrival in Bath:

Tuesday, September 10.—Arrive at Bath about 2. Dine, and spend the evening in looking for lodgings. Read Mrs. Robinson’s Valcenga.

Wednesday, September 11.—Look for lodgings; take some, and settle ourselves. Read the first volume of The Antiquary, and work.

Mary had begun a short story version of the “nightmare” vision of that summer while in Switzerland, which Byron had referred to as a “Pygmalion” tale of making a man, but with Shelley’s encouragement, she had decided to write a full novel, which she began in earnest at Bath, writing the first chapters of Frankenstein. She had been writing in a notebook she had purchased in Geneva, but purchased new English paper notebooks in Bath for her longer vision.

The Shelleys had two lodging locations in Bath. The first address was No 5 Abbey Churchyard, on the main square across from the west front of the Bath Abbey. That building, which housed a reading library which may have attracted Mary’s notice, and apartments, was torn down in 1889 to make way for the addition of the Victorian Queen’s Bath expansion of the Bath Pump Room. The other address was two blocks away at No 12 New Bond Street. Shelley was travelling for much of this time, dealing with money issues, negotiations with his father, Sir Timothy Shelley, over his inheritance and the two tragic suicide events, as well as looking for a hoped permanent house to settle in near his friend in Marlow.

In early October, Shelley was corresponding from the 5 Abbey Churchyard address to both Godwin, regarding money he had promised to lend, and to publisher John Murray regarding the eminent publishing of The Third Canto of Byron’s Childe Harold. Shelley was waiting for the publishing proofs to be sent to him at that address where he expected to remain for the winter. For her part, Mary addressed her letters from the 12 New Bond Street address, where Clare was residing. One might conjecture that this was an attempt to show Shelley and Mary, still unwed, to be living separately, or they may have set the nurse and her son in New Bond Street with the pregnant Clare, so that she could be with Shelley when he was in Bath. Mary referred to her step-sister, “looking in on” her, so they were for at least some time apart.

Not long after settling, Mary travelled to Marlow on the 19th of September to meet Shelley and returned on the 25th. They received an alarming letter from Fanny sent from Bristol on the 9th of October and Shelley went to find her, following her to Swansea where she had committed suicide. Mary noted in her diary on 12 October “buy mourning” purchasing mourning clothes for Fanny’s death, although there was no funeral and the body was unclaimed to keep her anonymity and reputation. Mary was writing Frankenstein off and on through this period with a number of references to writing in her diary, making revisions as she went.

She was reading sea voyage literature at this time, suggesting she was writing the Captain Walton beginning of the novel, inspired by her youthful visits to Dundee, Scotland. She was also reading Sir Humphrey Davy’s reference on chemistry, as she was working on Victor Frankenstein’s studies and scientific background. Davey was the originator of ideas of electro-chemistry and voltaic batteries which had so intrigued a young Percy Shelley at Oxford.

Mary wrote a letter on the 5th of December in good spirits to Shelley in Marlow that she had completed “chapter four” (the bringing to life Victor’s creature), but also involving Safie and the creature’s language learning, which she noted she thought was long. She later edited this significantly shorter for the published 1818 version, separating into two chapters. She was also concerned with Shelley’s tendency to latch onto the first house he might find, and seemed to have a wish not to have to live with her sister, which had been nearly constant for two years.

“I was awakened this morning by my pretty babe, and was dressed time enough to take my lesson from Mr. West, and (thank God) finished that tedious ugly picture I have been so long about. I have also finished the fourth chapter of Frankenstein, which is a very long one, and I think you would like it. And where are you? and what are you doing? my blessed love. … in the choice of a residence, dear Shelley, pray be not too quick or attach yourself too much to one spot. … A house with a lawn, a river or lake, noble trees, and divine mountains, that should be our little mouse-hole to retire to. But never mind this; give me a garden, and absentia Claire, and I will thank my love for many favours.”

In November, Shelley was reading Plutarch’s “Lives” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, and this seems to have crept into Mary’s writing, as she has the creature reading these while in the De Lacey Cottage in Chamonix.

Shelley returned to Bath from Marlow on the 14th of December, but the next day, the 15th , was informed in a letter from Thomas Hookham that his wife, Harriet Westbrook Shelley, was found drowned in the Serpentine Lake of Hyde Park. She had been missing from her residence for three weeks. She was named only as Harriet Smith at the inquest, a named she had used for a lodging in Queen Street. She had left no note, and little evidence was given, though a rumor suggested she was deserted by a household groom and that she had a proclivity to suicidal thoughts since her youth. The London Times reported only that a respectable lady she was found drowned “advanced in pregnancy”. Mary made no comment on the event of Harriet’s death, but she was enthusiastic to support Shelley’s effort to take custody of the children, Ianthe and Charles, and the Shelleys were now free to marry and hoped for a reconciliation with her father.

“How very happy shall I be to possess those darling treasures that are yours. I do not exactly understand what Chancery has to do in this, and wait with impatience for to-morrow, when I shall hear whether they are with you; and then what will you do with them? My heart says, bring them instantly here; but I submit to your prudence. You do not mention Godwin. When I receive your letter to-morrow I shall write to Mrs. Godwin. I hope, yet I fear, that he will show on this occasion some disinterestedness. Poor, dear Fanny, if she had lived until this moment she would have been saved, for my house would then have been a proper asylum for her.”

Shelley returned to visit Peacock in Marlow to search for a house they might take as a permanent residence and visited Leigh Hunt, the Publisher of the Examiner, beginning a long friendship. Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley went to London on December 30, 1816 to be married at St Mildred’s Church, and stayed with the Leigh Hunts. Godwin and Mrs. Godwin also attended the wedding. It was the first time Mary had seen her father since he banned them from Skinner Street after their return from the elopement in 1814. Clare stayed in Bath and Mary promised her a quick return.

Mary stopped writing on her novel during this time. Clare bore her daughter on January 12, 1817. She first named her Alba, in honor of the Shelleys’ nickname for Lord Byron, “Albe” (LB), put prudently changed the name later to Allegra, to avoid the too obvious connection. Mary wrote of “4 days of idleness” in her diary. Her son William’s first birthday was on January 24. Shelley had been in London since the 6th in Chancery Court arguing for custody of his children by Harriet, a suit he lost, despite Mary’s enthusiastic support. The Westbrooks had fought against his taking in the children, using his “atheistic” writings in Queen Mab as evidence of a lack of moral fitness. The children were sent to an unrelated clergyman in Warwick where Harriet had been living. The Shelleys left Bath on February 27, 1816 for Marlow. Mary was pregnant for the third time and beginning on a second notebook volume of her novel.

Take short tour of Bath today.

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The Shelleys – Gothic Romance Couple Forever

Mary Shelley and Percy ShelleyMarried Couple

The Shelleys Married

It’s official, Brangelina are breaking up, but the Shelleys are still the eternal romantic couple, and in essence the real love story of Frankenstein. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley married on December 30, 1816 at St Mildred’s Church in London. It was an eventful and turbulent two and half year romance up until then. They had eloped to the continent in the summer of 1814, endured the condemnation of society and estrangement of their families, one miscarriage and the infant death of another child, the suicide of Mary’s sister Fanny and spent that fateful summer of 1816 in Geneva from which Mary’s famous monstrous literary invention would launch them to forever Gothic fandom fame together. They would have to live separately, with Mary moving from one dingy neighborhood to another to avoid the unseemly criticism of their common associates, while Shelley dodged bill collectors, denied the money due from his grandfather’s estate by his father as penalty for his love of Mary, until the suicide of Shelley’s first wife would free him from the restriction of “living in sin”.

Curiously for a couple to be defined by their hurried and long delayed marriage, neither of them really believed in the institution of marriage, but could not avoid the social consequences of the institution. Mary’s philosopher father, William Godwin, had been famous for his intellectual rejection of the idea of marriage, as did Shelley in his concept of “free love” but Godwin had married Mary’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft to placate the judgment of their society and married again to Mary’s step-mother Mary Jane Clairmont. Indeed, it was Godwin, the most theoretical rejecter of the institution who was the hardest on Mary for her unmarried “illicit” relationship with Shelley, not because he believed in sin, but for its reflection on the reputation of his family, rejecting the affection of his daughter, even while accepting money from Shelley for his living expense, so much as to cause the scandalous perception that he had “sold” his daughter to the noble poet.

The modern version of Brad and Angelina at first avoided the artifice of official marriage, but ultimately fell to its hold on the concept of society. Curiously the divorce bill for the dissolution of Mr. and Mrs. Pitt doesn’t cite infidelity, but rather drug use in the home, as a cause of action. The tabloid scandal which had launched the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie romance to the headlines was contest between Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Anniston. Rumors had been spread and are even repeated to today suggesting that Shelley had an affair with Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont. Mary always rejected this idea until her dying day, but Shelley struggled with a dependence on laudanum for much of his life. It seems unlikely they would be broken up by the minor skirmishes of a modern day relationship. The Shelleys had endured so much turbulence and tragedy to be together, so that only Shelley’s tragic early death could break them up, and Mary would never marry again, so purely devoted, making them an eternal couple.

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Did Mary Shelley lie about the origin of Frankenstein?

Mary Shelley's Lost Book HateThe story has been told over and over, repeated by journalists, films and bloggers for almost 200 years. You know the familiar story, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori gathered around a fire on a dark and rainy night in the summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. They made a bet with each other who could write a scarier ghost story than the “penny dreadful” writers of the day. Mary Shelley went to her room and woke up from a dream, proclaiming she had seen the vision of a student of sciences standing over the horrible creature he created, and the thus began her inspiration to write her famous novel “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus”.

This telling appeared in the 1831 edition of the book, after the novels first appearance in 1818 without an author’s name and after becoming a scandalous sensation, came out in a new edition in 1822, with an introduction written by Percy Shelley, and then again in 1831 after Shelley’s death in Italy, with the lengthy preface, in which Mary said she included it after constant requests by readers to tell of how she came up with the story, told of how she struggled for several days to think of a worthy ghost story, and then finally one night, as she lay to sleep, “I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around.”

But is this story the full truth? As Mary said herself, “Everything must have a beginning, and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.” Authors do not wake up one morning and invent a full story. An idea, a concept, a vision, surely, but invariably informed by a personal past, a connection to something deeper in a lived experience. Mary drew for her characters and setting the world of Switzerland around her, the streets of the Plain Palais of Geneva and Mont Blanc outside her window. Yet, from where would the inner life of such a collection of characters of passion and betrayal come from in a young woman of eighteen? The influences of the exciting sciences of the day, electrified vermicelli and the buried, thought dead, ringing the bells from their coffins as they awoke from comas before they might be buried, were all around in the brewing ferment of the enlightening days of the late 18th and early 19th century. The author could infuse and develop these themes as the story took shape over time. But did Mary draw upon an earlier work to shape her first published book?

At the end of her “Six Weeks Tour” elopement with Percy Shelley and her step-sister Claire in 1814, Mary began her first attempt at a novel, which she entitled “Hate”. She never finished it or published it, and this seminal work of a young budding author of remarkable talent has never seen the light of day and Mary Shelley did not reveal its themes or content.

There has been considerable academic discussion over the years about how much her husband, Percy Shelley, may have contributed to the writing of the Frankenstein novel. Certainly, he encouraged her in the writing of it, and he may have offered some editing of it, but how much does he actually appear in the characters of the novel, and who else is represented in the pages? Was Mary’s first attempt at a novel, with the theme of an unexplained hate, also an influence or cannibalized in the writing of the second work? And was Mary Shelley being artfully discreet in her description of the events of that summer in Geneva?

In her public writings, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was very careful in her telling of personal events to leave in the editor’s bin any of the extraordinary personal trauma of her life, mentioning only in the slightest passing of a phrase the deep emotional struggles and passions that must have accompanied the passionate personalities which surrounded her. Deaths of her first born, two suicides, the scorn of society, the longing for a mother and hated step-mother, betrayed by an idolized father and the willful schemes of a step-sister which brought them, with an illegitimate pregnancy, to the doorstep of Lord Byron’s summer rental.

This suggests a thematic origin of something well beyond a ghost story about the hubris of science born in an instant from the image of a waking dream. Did that waking image really come from a past experience and more deeper personal meaning than just a casual story competition. Why did she never reveal from where she derived the unusual title name?

And did Mary Shelley finally reveal the truth behind this waking vision shortly before her death in a discovered confession in the form of a personal memoir of her first journey to Switzerland, in a fuller and more intimate “revised” version of her six weeks tour in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley.

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The Missing Novels of Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont

Hate and The Idiot – Competition of Two Sisters

Book Covers Hate and The Idiot Lost Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Jane Clara ClairmontMary Shelley is certainly famous for her seminal novel of Frankenstein, and she wrote other books to follow, but her first attempt at a novel begun during her teenage elopement and journey across Europe during the summer of 1814 with Percy Shelley and her step-sister Claire née Jane Clairmont is long missing, with only a brief reference to it in letters and her journal. And it was from that journey as well, Claire also attempted a novel, long missing to literature’s judgment.

Mary Shelley, still then Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, began a book while traveling on route back to England after the adventures of France and Switzerland only known by its title “Hate”. Mary herself never publicly elaborated on its theme or content, except that it apparently brought some amusement to Shelley. She abandoned it before completion and one could imagine it might contain themes she would revisit in her later published book, and may have been inspired by the emotional reaction to experiences of her journey of six weeks together with her step-sister and her lover across the devastated lands of France ravaged by the recent Napoleonic War. The title is at the least, tantalizing.

Claire had also begun a novel at the age of 16, with a title no less curious and intriguing for its sharp brevity, “The Idiot”. It is also lost to time and mystery, and its fate may be evidenced in her later expression of some jealousy over her sister’s and her family’s literary success, writing after the death of her brother William in 1832, “In our family, if you cannot write an epic poem or novel that by its originality knocks all other novels on the head, you are a despicable creature, not worth acknowledging.” And wondering, “What would they have done or said had their children been fond of dress, fond of cards, drunken, profligate, as most people’s children are?” – a decided contrast between her Clairmont family character and the more serious Godwins.

In her diary of September of 1814 begun after her travels, Claire would write of wanting to create a character whose independence of mind would cause others to judge them as an “Ideot”. There is evidence that Claire sent this work, perhaps more work-in-progress than completed novel, to Lord George Byron, when she had insinuated an introduction to him in 1816. She noted in letters, using her then preferred name of Clara Clairmont, that it was “half a novel or a tale”, with the pretext of looking for career advice. She was undecided upon either a writing career or an entrance onto the stage through Byron’s connection to the Drury Lane Theater, though she was possibly most interested in a romance with the poet.

Bryon apparently did not respond to it at the time. In a rather desperate sounding and forward letter of a young acolyte who had not received a response, she wrote him, “If you said you were too busy to look at it, I should have understood …it may arise from your affairs and then I am tiresome; or it may be occasioned by negligence, which to me is at least as bad.” Apparently in her eagerness, she made the mistake of submitting a first incomplete draft to someone who didn’t know her. And one may imagine what someone of Byron’s place with many eager fans may have thought of the submission. “Will you make allowance for my years? I do not expect you to approve; all I wish to know is whether I have talents, which, if aided by severe study may render me fit to become an author. I had half resolved to correct and revise it; but afterword, thought if you saw it just as it was, written at intervals, and in scraps, you would be a better judge.”

As for what the story was, she did outline her theme. “My intention was to draw a character committing every violence against received opinion…who knew no other guide on the impulses arising from herself, than herself…whose sweetness and naiveté of character should draw upon her the pity rather than the contempt of her readers.” The story also dealt with themes of Atheism and Christianity and bore some evidence of the journey she had undertaken with her step-sister and Shelley as told in The  Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley, the Frankenstein Diaries.

“It is at present in a very rude state; perhaps the whole of the first part should be rewritten,” she went on. “The tale is too abruptly begun; I am aware that the first sentence rather tempts one to throw the book down than to continue.” Not the most positive way to present a work for judgment. It is difficult to judge the book with no example remaining, but not hard to suggest that her writing as a teenager may not have been to the standard of her relatives, though her later letters evidenced her skill with words and her intelligence. And where Mary Shelley had resolved not to make herself the protagonist of her stories, Claire’s book seemed as if it was decidedly focused on herself, if in thin disguise. Mary would begin Frankenstein about the same time that Claire was presenting her draft to Byron, and would go though many revisions with the help of Shelley.

While Bryon showed no interest in the book by Miss Clairmont, she pursued him in person, resulting in a daughter between them.  Byron rejected Claire when she came to him pregnant with his child and had apparently  coldly rejected her as he did her writing. She would write to him in 1816 following the summer in Geneva in a letter full desperation at his indifference and longing for his attention, “Now, if I tell you my thoughts, dearest, you mustn’t bring them against me to make me look foolish as you did that hateful novel thing I wrote.”

Percy Shelley may have given Claire some assistance with her story and attempted to help her get it published in 1817, offering it to two publishers, Thomas Hookham, where at the same time he and Mary were publishing their travel journal “History of a Six Weeks Tour”, and to John Murray. Claire’s book was rejected, and never heard from again. She did have the last laugh though on her tragic family circle of romantics, by living to the age of 80.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

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